Roman Britain / by R.G. Collingwood.

R. G. Collingwood

Date:: 1924

Credit: Roman Britain / by R.G. Collingwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$England. In mediaeval times its importance passed to Shrewsbury, better suited to the tactics of the Middle Ages but too confined for the quarters of a Roman legion. Viroconium was 170 acres in extent; its walls* roughly oval in shape, were three to four miles long. The excavations of recent years have taught us a good deal about its houses, but have revealed as yet no great buildings to match the town hall and baths already known. The town hall is remarkable for the massive fragment of brick wall still standing high above ground ; the baths for their symmetrical plan, two independent suites of bath buildings, as it might be for men and women, opening right and left off a central court, and also for the discovery of skeletons huddled inside the heating-arrangements beneath the floors, evidence of the violent fate which overtook the town in some raid about the end of the fourth century. Lincoln, even more certainly than Wroxeter, was a legionary fortress, finely placed on a strong hill-top, which became a civil town. It was occupied probably before 50 by the Ninth legion, and when that legion, perhaps about the year 75, moved on to York, the colonia which had grown up round the fortress continued to develop. There is little that can here be said about Lincoln ; we mention it chiefly to call attention to the Roman arched gateway, the Newport Arch, of which enough has remained intact down to modern times to give a good idea of the whole. As an example of an almost wholly military town York may be mentioned. Here on the site of the old English town, clustered round the Minster, was the fortress first of the Ninth and later of the Sixth legions; across the Ouse, where the railway station stands, was the colonia of Eburacum. A colonia was a settlement of veteran soldiers who were given allotments of land and main¬ tained with the double object of forming a potential garrison and providing for the c ex-service man \ In Britain, beside York, there were colonies at Lincoln, Gloucester, and Colchester. The$

Roman Britain / by R.G. Collingwood.

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